"There is only one real reason to read a poem," writes Jane Hirshfield, "and that is to find your way to a larger life than would otherwise be yours to live."
This great thought begins her equally great article "Telescope, Well-bucket, Furnace: Poetry Beyond the Classroom," published for The Writer’s Chronicle, a publication of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in the summer of 2003. In the article, Hirshfield highlights many points about reading and/or writing good poetry. Most implicitly, however, she explains the utter expansiveness of good poetry and how the discovery of it is a liberating experience, as described in this paragraph:
Kafka called literature an axe that breaks open the frozen sea inside us. His sentence describes the liberation and discovery of genuine art. It also holds a diagnosis: we are beings in need of breaking open, if we are to know the full dimensions of who we are. In his works, Kafka drew portraits not just of individuals but of an age still recognizably our own. The frozen sea is not only an individual prison, it is the quality of a culture in which, as the Siberian herders might say, certain powerful but stupid gods hold sway. It is not necessary here to name them, the list would be long and also boring. But one can say this much: these cultural forces do not want us to find our way to the serious depths. They want to keep us as they are: uni-dimensional and shallow and hungry only for a life of the surface.
You can read the article here.
If you enjoyed this article, you can read another marvelous interview by Ivy Alvarez, Jack Anders, and Jenni Russell for MiPO's print edition, Volume 19, Edition 2, March 2005.
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